John Lynn is the Founder of the HealthcareScene.com blog network which currently consists of 10 blogs containing over 8000 articles with John having written over 4000 of the articles himself. These EMR and Healthcare IT related articles have been viewed over 16 million times. John also manages Healthcare IT Central and Healthcare IT Today, the leading career Health IT job board and blog. John is co-founder of InfluentialNetworks.com and Physia.com. John is highly involved in social media, and in addition to his blogs can also be found on Twitter: @techguy and @ehrandhit and LinkedIn.

In a recent call with the Collaborative Health Consortium, Mark Blatt, MD, Director of Intel Health made some pretty strong statements as a front end to the Healthcare Unbound conference happening this week. In his comments he essentially predicts the end of Fee-For-Service, calling it a dinosaur that will not survive and saying that “this is like a 30-day eviction notice…and it’s happening faster than anyone thinks.”

I find this really interesting because he’s the second high level leader in healthcare that I’ve heard say that the switch away from Fee for Service is happening faster than any of us realize. I wonder what the consequences will be of us not realizing this change is happening. Plus, the odd thing is that we can all see this change happening. Is is that we’re just not understanding the consequences the change will have on the healthcare business?

I also was really intrigued with Mark Blatt’s list of thing you need for a successful transition from Fee for Service:
1. Patient empowerment
2. Mobilize data
3. Share data
4. Gather and store data

When I first considered this list, I realized that EHR could help to enable all of these things. In many ways it already is working to make many of these things possible in an organization. Without the EHR’s involvement, many of these objectives will fall flat.

Although, I also realize that many of these objectives require something outside of the EHR. Will they eventually integrate with the EHR, that’s the vision of some EHR vendors. However, I believe it will take years for us to get there. Until we get there, I think it’s going to create a really tough integration challenge for organizations.

3 responses to "Fee for Service is Dead"

Since the unspoken bipartisan goal is to lower healthcare costs by paying (disappearing) doctors increasingly less for their time, it shouldn’t be surprising that treatment decisions made by doctors and patients will be increasingly determined by cost-control algorithms rather than human preference and quality – using EHRs paid for by doctors to justify the pay cuts.

Even though Minnesota recently became the first state in the nation to mandate EHR adoption as a requirement for licensure of dentists, lack of security will stop the progress of politically-correct, Meaningful Use in dentistry. Within the last year, Dentrix, the nation’s most popular electronic dental record system used by tens of thousands of dentists with millions of patients, has received two Vulnerability Notes from the US Department of Homeland Security.http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/948155http://www.kb.cert.org/vuls/id/900031

It seems that no matter what unresponsive Dentrix officials try, they simply cannot keep Justin Shafer from hacking their encryption before using YouTube to show DHS how he does it. As one can see in the Vulnerability Notes, DHS has thanked Justin twice for helping to protect the identities of millions of Americans.